It doesn't feel like it's suppressing the news. Can you give examples of suppression? I'd say hacker news is very open to contrary ideas and disagreements.
If it's political, there's a good chance it gets flagged. The problem is pretty much everything is political when you have a government that sticks it's grubby little fingers where it shouldn't.
I prefer HN for higher quality discussions. When I say posts which are pure political flame wars I (and many others) flag the post. Reddit is full of low information discussions. There's no need to also duplicate those posts here.
Everything is not political, and this statement itself is flamebait. Take a look at posts on the current homepage. Most are pure tech with no politics. Some are political with a tech angle but not flame wars.
Politics is defined as the way a system of multiple agents (typically humans) with conflicting goals, resolves to one outcome. That's pretty much everything. Almost all of economics, for example, is politics. API design is politics. UI design is politics. Putting /active behind a footer link is politics. Everything any government does is politics (or the government wouldn't have to do it). Every dispute is politics. There are a few things that are not politics, such as the colour of the sky, but almost everything humans make involves politics. The number of spokes in a wheel is politics, since the manufacturer wants as few as they can get away with. All news relates to politics.
Have you actually ever browsed the secret “active” page where you can see what people are actually voting for without the mods putting their thumbs on the scale? It’s constantly filled with dead posts because someone said something that was vaguely unflattering towards Israel, venture capital, capitalism in general, the United States or Apple. Literally happens dozens of times every single day.
It's hardly secret—it's on the /lists page which is referenced in the footer of every page on HN.
It simply isn't the frontpage, for reasons that ought to be obvious to anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. How you guys turn this into sinister suppression continues to escape me.
Edit: perhaps this will help:
HN is designed to downweight sensational-indignant stories, internet dramas, and riler-uppers, for the obvious reason that if we didn't, then they would dominate HN's frontpage like they dominate the rest of the internet. Anyone who spends time here (or has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) knows that this is not what the site is for. The vast majority of HN readers like HN for just this reason. It is not some arbitrary switch that we could just flip, if only we would stop being censoriously sinister. It's essential to the operation of the site.
It's on display in the bottom of a locked homepage footer stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard'.
Footers are very rarely useful and I don't know anyone who habitually reads them. They usually contain useless but technically required legal information. Meanwhile the lists you actually want people to use are in the header.
The level of discrepancy between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality is miles apart. Every day.
Edit: since I can’t reply because my account was throttled for “posting too past” with a whopping 5 comments in the last 24 hours. Allow me to paste it here…
It would probably help if I were to bring a bit more specificity to my accusations here so we aren’t just talking about an abstract concept.
I’m making the claim:
1. The active page (what people are actually engaging with) and the front page (mods choice) regularly are regularly out of sync not just in general but in very specific and consistent ways.
2. There is a small group of people who intentionally use the flagging functionality in ways that have absolutely zero to do with the rules as they are written. People are incredibly open about this on a regular basis.
3. We are left with a de facto situation where that same small group are able to effectively censor what the rest of the community is allowed to talk about.
4. The moderation team seems to operate on the idea that everyone is just acting in good faith despite evidence to the contrary.
5. When the discrepancies between the rules as they are written and how things work in reality occur they are very rarely corrected by the moderation team and I don’t know what other conclusion to draw other than you seem to think that things are going great as they are and there’s no need to change anything.
6. You say the active page isn’t a secret but people are always saying they had no idea it existed. Surely you have some actual hard analytics numbers to show what percentage of logged in users visit the active page? I presume it’s in the single digits percentage wise but I’m open to being told otherwise.
The closest I can give to an account of "how things work in reality" is the 80,000+ moderation comments I've posted over the last 10+ years: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=by:dang&type=comment&dateRange.... You're free to decide it's all lies, of course, but if you (or anyone) randomly scroll back through that feed, I doubt you'll find much that's miles apart from the rules as they are written. In fact I'd be surprised if you found anything that could be fairly be described that way, because trying to apply the rules as they are written is a matter of integrity for us. If it weren't, we'd change the rules until it were.
I had to rely inline above because of some questionable circumstances but not here to debate that part at all.
But on the topic of this active page I do find it rather poetic that in this exact thread we have people asking what is this page they’ve never heard of.
When I call it secret, I don’t mean it’s necessarily a coverup or something I mean that nobody seems to know that it exists or that the front page doesn’t actually represent what people vote for.
You might want to use a more accurate word like 'obscure' in that case.
At this point I'm not sure what you're accusing us of, other than HN not being a different kind of site. The mandate of this place is clear (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), and it simply isn't primarily to feature political/sensational/outrage stories. That's the root issue. The mechanics of voting, flagging, etc., are in service of that.
From my perspective, you're arguing for a health food store to devote its shelf space to chocolates and pastries. Or, if you prefer the other way round, for a confectionery to devote itself to turnips.
I don’t think that actually engages with literally any of the points I’ve made but sure, I wasn’t expecting anything else. Like I said earlier it seems from where you’re sitting everything is going great and there’s nothing to answer for.
I was hoping however you could at least shine some light on the active page question… what percentage of users actually visit in on any given day? We can play semantic games about secret vs obscure but it’s not a debate about semantics.
If you knew how bad HN regularly makes me feel, you would be attributing very different sentiments than those. The point isn't that HN is perfect or even very good. It's that your objections are ignoring what the site is for. Improving the site means making it better fulfill its mandate, but you're not arguing from that place at all, and in fact are (implicitly) arguing that we rip out that mandate and replace it with a different one.
I haven't looked up the number of users who visit the /active page because I don't accept the premise of your question. Of course fewer users look at it than the frontpage; otherwise it would be the frontpage. This is just another variation of the mandate argument.
I’m not here to try and make you feel bad but if this place doesn’t work for you anymore I hope you’re able to do something about that.
I’m going to wrap this up here. You unfortunately responded in exactly the way I’d expected to just hand wave away everything, find reasons to not respond to any of the points and then seemed to misrepresent what I was even asking for.
I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with that.
Life is hard enough already and I’m not looking to make it worse for you. I hope you have a nice holiday season and good luck out there.
You're not making me feel bad! I just mentioned that HN regularly makes me feel bad as a way of letting you know that I definitely don't think this place is perfect.
I'm not disinterested in answering your questions—that's why I've been replying repeatedly! Nor am I interested in making hand-wavey responses; that would be a waste of time. We must be working with different assumptions, though, because I feel like I'm answering your questions and you feel like I'm not.
If you want to try again, I'd be happy to, but maybe we could take a different approach? I would like to know what principle you care about here. What principle are we failing to abide by, that you think we ought to?
Balatro and a number of other games have. But react-native? I can't think of an example and the framework wouldn't be my choice for "award winning" design.
Watch Duty won with a Cordova app in the "Social Impact" category, so it's not impossible.
> If you have a good audit process then errors get detected even if AI helped introduce them. If you aren't doing a good audit then I suspect nobody cares whether your financial statement is correct (anyone who did would insist on an audit).
Volume matters. The single largest problem I run into: AI can generate slop faster than anyone can evaluate it.
Foundations just reprinted Savannah Lions (the 2/1 for W). It's still a good card in Limited (one of two actual good, popular formats in MtG). The interaction soup people of thousands of cards? Actually good in commander (the other actually liked format, a causal game for four people).
MtG's primary problems are: Wizards trying to make formats happen, often making them worse in the process, and price creep on their printed cardboard from: UB price hikes and MH price hikes, rarelands, chase mythics, questionable rotation changes, Secret Lair fails, pro-scalper behavior, etc...
I run the famous Kird Ape/Taiga combo in my Kibo, Uktabi Prince commander deck. It's a turn one 2/3 with the right opening hand (easier now because there are a lot more mountain forests).
The game is definitely going through a metamorphosis right now with the focus on Universes Beyond (licensed IP crossovers) and "collectors", in some ways Hasbro is trying to have their cake and eat it too. Whatever form it takes going forward it's managed to repeatably re-engage my interest for the last thirty years which is more than can be said about any other game.
Commander is a super casual format (that was not even controlled by Wizards of the Coast until relatively recently). Almost all cards from Magic's history are allowed with the caveat of no more than one of each named card per deck.
> The sad fact is that the software industry as a whole relies heavily on mainstream languages, and not on educating your engineers to leverage the strengths of your specialty language.
Except when the language is the workhorse of a proprietary product sold to your employer. SQL is the example that escaped into the open world, but see also MATLAB and Excel formulae/VBA.
As a similar but distinct theory, you might find Larry McEnerney‘s work interesting. Writing has two classes: a writing for thought and a writing for communication. Larry uses horizontal and vertical spatial metaphors here. Writing for thought still pre-dates cheap paper (and Socrates), but is mostly a private act. Writing for communication is a broad enough brush to span fiction and journalism. For his part, Larry teaches classes aimed at thesis writers who struggle to bridge the divide of using writing to think about a problem to conveying their answer in a paper.
While Elixir is my current favorite language to hack in, it is very alien and downright hostile to integrating with existing systems. For example, relational database support was postgres focused for a long time (to the exclusion even of SQLite and continued inability to talk to Oracle). Then you have articles like https://dashbit.co/blog/you-may-not-need-redis-with-elixir pushing ETS over Redis. While it's a valid argument, it's not adoption-friendly.
Clojure brings about half the novelty of Elixir, runs on the JVM and still struggles to replace Java.
Pretty sure there has been BEAM connectivity for Oracle for at least five years. SQLite3 is one of the defaults in Phoenix and have been for a long time. I do mix phx.new curious_idea --database=sqlite3 at least once a week, it's a sub-minute effort to a mostly generated base for a prototype (with OK auth/user management) I can just throw on a VPS and show someone.
If you want an in memory store without interfacing over HTTP, that is less foreign than ETS, try Duckdbex. Mix.install or add to mix.exs, then it's two lines and you get a connection to an ephemeral database with a SQL interface. Can probably do the same with SQLite but I've never done it. If your needs are simple you can just boot a GenServer with a K-V structure as state.
Pattern matching, the capture operator and functional programming style are the really "hostile" parts, in my experience.
Apple has been the new Microsoft long enough, I've begun to suspect the current environment cannot support a new Apple. Joel Spoksky's 2004 "How Microsoft Lost the API War" [1] applies to Apple's 2019 introduction of SwiftUI. Some of the AI companies are trying, but the more favorably I think of a competitor in that market, the less likely they are to build consumer hardware.
Maybe for "Apple", but there's one team that takes performance seriously. The WebKit team has a zero tolerance policy for performance regressions (https://webkit.org/performance/) dating back to the implementation of the Page Load Test in 2002 (Creative Selection, p. 93).
WebKit sounds like the kind of scrappy startup Apple might want to acquire and gain some hard-earned engineering knowledge.
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